Monthly Archives: January 2008

Cool stuff in the dwarves front. They are growing. One new feature I’ve been working on is to be able to change the word-size.

One can now use the DWARF info produced for an architecture with a X word-size and see how it looks like on another architecture with word-size Y.

More work is needed to cope with exceptions to a general set of alignment rules and then we’ll be able to ask pahole for the best possible member organization that will work across a series of architectures.

The mailing list is picking up steam, with different suggestions being made and improvement ensuing, with more patches trickling in.

One example of recent changes that were discussed in the mailing list was the inline improvements in codiff, the binary diff tool, discussed with Ilpo Järvinen, that he right away used in debloating the Linux kernel network infrastructure.

Soon I’ll be hard pressed to do some further improvements, with database, probably sqlite, being used to cache the results using build-id, that is becoming the norm in the -debuginfo packages made by distros, used as a key to previous results.

Database caching, once implemented, will pave the way for historical data collection, when we’ll be able to see how data structures evolve over time, like when you keep drinking and see your belly go round 😎

At that point creating a script that checks out tag after tag (changeset even, since we have plenty unused CPU power and disk space) and builds a software project, creating database entries, this time SCM changeset/tag tagged.

Wouldn’t it be lovely to know exactly when that extra belly wrinkle fat was generated? 😉